Among the nectarines you buy at your supermarket this summer are those that have probably been brought to you by black market labour. Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker investigate the rotten truth behind our fruit.

As our car hurtles up the Murray Valley Highway, past small towns and empty pubs, the mood is tense. In the back seat is Mohammad Rowi, a quietly spoken Malaysian who has been ordered by the immigration department to leave Australia by midnight.

He is critical to today’s mission: to get a foot in the door of the underworld of illegal workers and human exploitation in Australia’s horticulture sector.

These people - misled, indebted and exploited - are picking some of the fruit that you and your family will buy from Coles, Woolworths and Costco and eat this summer.

Rowi is staring quietly out the car window. The sun is still rising, casting a gentle light over twisted gum trees and the seemingly endless expanse of farmland.

Waiting for him in Malaysia is a daughter he has never met. She was born after Rowi said goodbye to his wife and first child to work illegally on a network of farms in Victoria’s food bowl.

He was part of a sizeable workforce of undocumented and underpaid workers. Some are paid as little as a few dollars an hour - some even end up owing money - to work on Australian farms.

They live in dilapidated homes, sheds and caravans controlled by criminal syndicates who run the labour-hire firms that employ them.

If Rowi can make the right introductions, our plan is to send an undercover journalist into this world, to work on the orchards of the farming groups supplying the supermarket giants, Coles, Woolworths and Costco.

We want to test the claim of the farming companies using these labour hire firms that they, and the major supermarkets, are ignorant of the illicit practices.

To do this, we must establish trust with those in the labour black market in northwest Victoria, around the town of Swan Hill.

The use of exploited illegal foreign workers in Australia’s horticulture sector is under intense scrutiny. The Fair Work Ombudsman is running a major national investigation, the Harvest Trail Inquiry, and the federal government has created the Migrant Worker Taskforce, led by Professor Allan Fels and made up of officials from multiple agencies including the Australian Border Force and the FWO.

Victorian Industrial Relations Minister Natalie Hutchins says the exploitation has “been rife in Victoria for a long time”.

The use of illegal workers provides farms with a cheap, flexible and compliant workforce to carry out short stints of seasonal work at discount rates. This increases margins for farmers at a time when supermarkets are driving intense competition among suppliers and as temporary farm workers may be hard to find.

Mohammad Rowi’s trip to Australia began with an advertisement for a well-paid job posted on the wall of a local store in the small rural town of Jeli in Malaysia's east.

The heavy-set 36-year-old had lost his job as a surveyor and was desperate to support his family. He called the number and met a Malaysian fixer dripping in gold jewellery who produced his personal bank statement to show Rowi the riches that could be earned on a Victorian farm.

A review of online forums reveals dozens of similar advertisements. “Good pay!” they scream. “Job and accommodation guaranteed.”

Virtually all are predicated on the fact that the Malaysians who respond will work illegally. Australia issues only 100 working holiday visas to Malaysians each year, but evidence suggests there are many thousands working on farms and in other sectors across the nation. Most pay a fixer in Malaysia or Australia.

In return for $1500, Rowi was “guaranteed” lucrative work on a farm.

These funds financed an expensive lie. As an illegal worker, he would have no rights, and risked deportation if he dared complain to a boss who would also be breaching the law by employing him.

“These workers are ripe for exploitation.”

Allan Fels

When Rowi arrived in Melbourne in May last year, he headed to Southern Cross train station and waited for a fixer who never showed up. Rowi spent his first night in Australia sleeping fitfully in a bus shelter.

In the morning, he approached a Malaysian with a backpack, who said he was going to the northwest of Victoria to pick fruit, and invited Rowi to tag along.

Rowi arrived in Swan Hill, a bustling regional centre on the Murray River with a population of 20,000 people. He quickly secured a job with a Vietnamese labour hire contractor known as Cindy. He worked seven days a week, sometimes from 6.30am to 9pm, on a grape farm in Robinvale (103 kilometres from Swan Hill) earning about $80 a day, or as little as a quarter of what is required under the law.

At night, he worked by torchlight, securing netting over the grapes. Cindy deducted around $100 each week for rent. After three weeks, Rowi and a second worker complained to the farmer (who has been the subject of repeated immigration department raids over the past decade).

Rowi says the farmer blamed Cindy.

“‘I paid the contractor. The contractor has taken the money.’”

Rowi found a better-paying contractor and new farms to work on, and his daily wage fluctuated between $50 to $110 cash a day, minus deductions for rent and transport. This was mostly well under the legal award wage but allowed Rowi to begin saving a small amount of money.

He also met dozens of other illegal Malaysian workers. Some of them were working for no net income after paying for rent and transport, and putting money towards the debts incurred while getting their jobs.

After eight months of orchard hopping, Rowi was driving several illegal workers to a farm when his rear tyre blew and the vehicle ran off the road and flipped.

He was charged by the local police with one count of dangerous driving and, because he had no visa, was remanded in Barwon Prison.

He would stay there for 258 days, alongside accused rapists, murderers and other felons, as his case dragged through the Swan Hill courts, being repeatedly adjourned due to a lack of translators.

In late June, the Malaysian consulate-general in Melbourne arranged for a lawyer, Vicknaraj Thanarajah, to help pro-bono. In October, Rowi pleaded guilty to a single charge and was released. The immigration department gave him six days to leave Australia. Thanarajah decided to call a journalist.

“I thought to myself, this guy can expose what is happening to thousands of Malaysian workers,” he says.

“This is modern-day slavery.”

We arrive in Swan Hill at 10am and arrange a rendezvous with one of Rowi’s Malaysian mates - we’ll call him Jimmy - who is a worker turned illegal labour-hire syndicate middleman.

In Swan Hill, agriculture is one of the biggest employers. Malaysian and Afghan migrant workers are easy to spot on the main strip.

Jimmy is scared to be seen in public with us, so we drive to an empty park next to the Swan Hill railway station and sit next to a giant statue of a blue-and-green dotted Murray cod. Jimmy shivers in the cold morning air as he details the illegal worker ecosystem thriving in the region.

Jimmy provides around two dozen illegal Malaysian labourers to local farmers who he describes as mostly “good guys”. There are well over 20 middle men like Jimmy in the region. Each controls his or her own group of overseas workers without working visas.

Jimmy explains that the wages of these illegal workers depend on the integrity of the middleman assigning them work, the deal that middleman has struck with a farmer, the availability of work and the desperation of the worker.

He insists he looks after his workers, paying them at least $13 an hour (the casual award rate is $22 an hour), from which he deducts rent and travel fees.

There is another way to pay workers in the Australian agricultural sector – the piece rate – in which a person is paid for each tree they prune, thin or pick. Illegal workers on the piece rate will typically pocket less, between $30 to $80 a day, even though the law requires “competent” piece rate workers to get 15 per cent more than the legal hourly rate, and to sign paperwork guaranteeing this. This is never done when illegal workers are used.

To house his workers, Jimmy rents a run-down house from a local farmer. Two to three workers sleep on thin mattresses on the floor in each of the four rooms.

The house is not quite slum-like but it is not far off. But Jimmy is immensely proud of the abode on the basis that it is infinitely better than the alternatives, including the clusters of caravans in empty lots or dilapidated farm houses dotted around the region.

The Nyah caravan park, which is adjacent to a petrol station 15 minutes drive from Swan Hill, is known as Malay Village due to the high proportion of Malaysian workers living there.

Jimmy reels off the names of the notorious exploiters of illegal workers, including some who pay their workers so little that after rent and expenses they are left in debt.

“Some of them owe money; some are negative,” Jimmy explains.

There is Tony the Punjabi, Cindy the Vietnamese and Lee the Afghan.

Jimmy agrees to give us a tour of the farms using illegal workers.

On the edge of a stone fruit orchard, we meet a Malaysian man who lives in a farmhouse in Woorinen, a small town a few minutes drive from Swan Hill.

The man says that up to 25 workers employed by Lee the Afghan live in the run-down house on a dirt road nestled between two orchards. They sleep next to one another on mattresses on the floor.

“It is very difficult to cook and to shower. It is very difficult to live there,” the Malaysian man explains in broken English.

But this worker can’t leave because Lee is withholding his pay. He earns just $80 a day, minus a 13 per cent commission pocketed by Lee and a $10-per-day rent payment.

Another Malaysian illegal worker we meet on the edge of an orchard, Mohammad, describes his previous job earning as little as $20 a day on a farm in Robinvale. Having subsequently found a more honest contractor, Mohammad now earns around $13 an hour.

As we interview this worker, a white ute cruises past several times. A panicked Jimmy tells us that word is spreading that we are from immigration.

“Farmers are calling the contractors,” he explains. “The workers are scared.”

A group of Malaysian workers thinning trees (removing branches) about 500 metres ahead of us suddenly scamper into the orchard. For the rest of the day, we meet workers in homes with curtains drawn.

We are told by a number of illegal workers that Lee the Afghan works closely with Cutri Fruit, a leading Australian stone fruit supplier that sells peaches and nectarines directly to Coles, Woolworths and Costco. The Woorinen farm house, which is controlled by Lee and crammed with up to 25 illegal workers paying $70 a week rent, is just a few minutes walk from Cutri Fruit’s orchards.

We finish the day eating Halal KFC with 15 illegal workers in a house in Swan Hill. Not all of the Malaysian workers we meet feel they are being exploited. Two Malaysian women on student visas are breaching their visa conditions by working more than 20 hours a week but are happy with their $17-an-hour wage ($5 under the award rate) packing fruit for a well-known farming family.

Cutri Fruit headquarters in Swan Hill.

As we prepare to leave Swan Hill, we notice several other Malaysians arriving and being picked up by labour hire contractors in car parks.

The KFC meal in Swan Hill is something of a last supper for Rowi. He hugs his fellow Malays and we begin the four-hour drive to Melbourne Airport. He will return home having saved nothing after expenses and having spent 258 days in prison. At the airport, he buys two soft koala teddy bears for his daughters, including the baby girl he has never met.

That night, we search the property records of the Woorinen farmhouse run by Lee the Afghan, which accommodates up to 25 illegal workers at a time. They record its owner as Immuto Fleur Nominees Pty Ltd. The company is controlled by Cutri Fruit.

As Rowi lands in Kuala Lumpur from Melbourne, Malaysian journalist Saiful Hasam is preparing to head to Australia. Saiful is a bearded, barrel-chested Malaysian who works for the popular Malaysian language daily newspaper Utusan Malaysia, and is is often given the more adventurous assignments. It is Saiful who has come to slip into the opening that Rowi has created, posing as an illegal worker.

He lands in Melbourne with a short-term visa on October 26 and heads to The Age offices, where he phones one of the lieutenants of Lee the Afghan, a man called Pak Mur. Saiful is immediately offered a job and accommodation.

Arriving in the evening at Swan Hill railway station, Saiful is greeting by Pak Mur, who agrees to pose in a selfie. For those in the illegal worker trade, business seems good. Saiful covertly records video on his mobile phone that captures Pak Mur, a 50-something Indonesian, discussing the Lee syndicate’s control of around 60 workers.

Selfie: Saiful and Pak Mur.

Saiful is then taken to the Cutri-owned Woorinen farmhouse, which is now home to 12 illegal workers - a number of others have left over a wage dispute.

Saiful sleeps on a mattress on the floor. The next morning, a Friday, he arrives at Cutri Fruit orchard and watches as several dozen foreign workers receive a briefing from a labour hire supervisor about how to “thin” - or prune - stone-fruit trees to prepare them for picking in a few weeks. Workers will be paid per tree - the piece rate.

Given his lack of experience, Saiful anticipates earning less than those more experienced. Even taking this into account, his rates are dismal. On Friday, he earns just $16 for 6.25 hours intensive work at an effective hourly rate of $2.56; on Saturday, he earns $48.10 for 9.25 hours work; on Monday, he works just over three hours to earn $13. He then works the Melbourne Cup public holiday on another orchard, earning a total of $22 for five hours and 20 minutes work.

Saiful says many of the illegal workers he laboured alongside earned only slightly more. The workers we interviewed, along with a study submitted to a recent Victorian government inquiry called the Forsyth inquiry, suggest the average hourly wage paid by contractors to fruit pickers with work rights is around $13 an hour.

On Thursday, with an ABC 7.30 camera crew, we rendezvous with Saiful at the Woorinen sport oval. It’s empty save for a man preparing the cricket pitch with a roller.

“There are so many stories about the hardship here,” Saiful says quietly. “[They chase the] Australian dream, but they end up being ripped off. But they have no choice.”

One unresolved question is whether Cutri Fruit knows it is using illegal workers at risk of exploitation. Saiful is prepared to test this.

Half an hour later, with a small camera hidden in his black beanie, he walks into Cutri Fruit’s Woorinen headquarters, holding a handwritten letter that explains he is working on Cutri orchards for Lee, earning well below legal rates. Saiful’s cover story is that he wants to work directly with Cutri Fruit to boost his wages.

Saiful is met by Marc Intervera, Cutri Fruit’s research, development and innovations manager who, after confirming that Saiful is working on Cutri orchards, asks him whether he is an illegal worker. The exchange, recorded on tape, appears to be a damning indictment of Cutri Fruit’s labour practices.

“Are you legal? You got legal papers?”, Intervera asks.

Saiful confirms he has been working illegally. Intervera’s response is instant: “You have to work through Lee anyway. You are not legal. I can’t employ you anyway,” he says.

“I can’t employ you direct. You don’t have the paper. You know what I mean? That is why we use the contractor because, I don’t know, they dodgy it up.

“But we can’t, I can’t do it direct. But I can have a chat to Lee though.”

Cutri Fruit’s managing director, Gaethan Cutri, is a former lawyer who sits on the Coles Produce Agronomy Group. Last week, he politely declined via email to answer detailed questions and there is no evidence he personally knows his company is using illegal workers. But the comments made to Saiful by Intervera (who didn’t respond to questions sent via email) along with the fact that a Cutri Fruit linked company owns a farmhouse used to accommodate illegal workers, suggests, at the very least, that some at Cutri Fruit are turning a blind eye.

On Monday, Cutri Fruit stressed it would “never knowingly exploit illegal workers” and it required its labour hire contractors to commit in writing to act lawfully. It has sacked two contractors, including one last month, and, as a result of Fairfax Media’s investigation, demanded its existing contractors prove they operate with integrity. Cutri Fruit has also committed to a “broader independent audit this month to assess if there are any undetected issues.”

A Coles spokesman said the supermarket giant had “referred the allegations regarding Cutri Fruit to the Fair Work Ombudsman” and launched its own probe, while Costco said it intended to audit Cutri Fruit, and would would not buy its fruit until this was done. Woolworths said the company had strict policies responsible sourcing and would refer any alleged breaches by a supplier to authorities.

Cutri Fruit is no better or worse than many farms, meat suppliers, convenience and fast-food outlets and industries relying on low-skilled labour across Australia.

As Allan Fels, the Forsyth inquiry, and revelations from past migrant worker exploitation scandals make clear, the problem appears entrenched, and existing regulation and policing is failing to make an impact.

“Some farmers want labour that they can exploit the hell out of. Migrants are not seen as people, but as commodities,” says National Union of Workers federal secretary Tim Kennedy, who also accuses the major supermarkets of turning a blind eye to the problem.

Senior law enforcement officials are privately calling for new, tough criminal sanctions to apply to middlemen like Lee to create a deterrence. Victoria’s Industrial Relations Minister minister Natalie Hutchins is pushing for a system of labour hire licensing and other major legislative reforms aimed at protecting vulnerable workers while her federal counterpart, Michaelia Cash, is boosting the powers and funding of the Fair Work Ombudsman.

“There is much, much more to do,” says Fels.

Saiful’s last undercover act is to collect his belongings and the money he is owed for his four days work. We drop him a few hundred metres from the Woorinen farmhouse.

He emerges half an hour later with his pay for just over 24 hours work over four days.

It’s $100. It should be $110 but, in a final insult, one of Lee’s associates has short-changed Saiful $10. After the rent he has paid the Lee syndicate, he is left with just $30.

Saiful says that a Malaysian female illegal worker in the Woorinen house cried when he said he was leaving.

“I feel so sad for those I left behind,” he says.

“There is a thousand stories here, there are a thousand sad stories.”

In a few days, he will return to his job as a journalist in Malaysia.

The workers he leaves behind will soon be slogging away on food-bowl farms as the picking season ramps up. And the fruits of their labour, the peaches and nectarines they pick, will appear, fresh and appetising in the fruit sections of Coles and Woolworths.